I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to aviation technology, enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Delivering The Organization Of The Future. Powered By IT

As I write about the way IT should be done, I’m aware that for those sitting in the trenches of enterprise IT, it’s all too easy to justify the status quo and avoid change. While, as I wrote earlier this week, the reality for enterprise IT is slow and methodical progress, that needs to be seen in light of the tectonic changes occurring in society and their impact on organizations. While wanting to retain some perspective in-between all the vendor hyperbole (on both sides of the adoption continuum), I also want to call out the enterprise IT shops that won’t change, for no other reason than wanting to remain a silo in perpetuity.

I’d be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time I heard comments like “but our requirements mean we need a highly complex architecture”, “we have 30 years of legacy here to keep running” or “but we can’t get budget to start doing things alternative ways”. These comments are justified – large enterprises are immensely complex, IT departments are faced with ever shrinking budgets and the compliance load from well-meaning but often unintended consequence creating regulations is significant.

And yet, despite all the valid reasons not to reinvent how enterprises work, every now and then one comes across an exemplar organization that shows just how empowering wholesale change can be. Anyone who attends cloud computing conferences, or reads tech blogs, will know the story of NetflixNetflix. Its cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, is a poster boy for the value of cloud infrastructure in general, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in particular. NetflixNetflix is legendary for using the full breadth of AWS functionality, and building a bunch of services on top of AWS to extend it even further. The curiously names “Simian Army”, a series of automated processes the company created to test different parts of Netflix&#039;Netflix&#039; infrastructure, have kept pundits entertained for hours. While quirky in name, the Simian Army indicates just how different NetflixNetflix approaches IT – these tests are designed to try and break systems, and in doing so Netflix continually improves what it does. Netflix literally plans for failure, they are aware that things break sometimes and hence they spend their time working out how to keep services running in the face of outages.

But as impressive as the Netflix story is, it’s primarily the story of the execution of a greenfields opportunity. While it is true that Netflix has it’s own data centers and had to work out how the move to the cloud would proceed, it’s also fair to say that Netflix didn’t have massive amounts of legacy software to worry about – after all its digital distribution service has only existed for little more than a decade, not long enough to lumber them with mainframes down in the basement.

So it’s exciting to spend time with people from an organization that has this dinosaur legacy to maintain, and yet despite the very real drag that this creates, manages to create a culture and a technology approach that makes innovation possible. Case in point: Warner Music Group (WMG), who for close to 60 years has been one of the largest recording companies in the world. This is one organization that absolutely has all of the reasons to avoid IT innovation. Legacy infrastructure? Check. Competitive threats squeezing budget? Check.

Yet despite all this, over the past couple of years WMG has been at the forefront of this move to a new model – a model that recognizes the world is fundamentally changing and that the business needs to change in order to remain competitive. And if the business needs to change then IT can be an enabler for that change. Interestingly (and more so since WMG has the luxury of being privately held and thus not required to disclose such things), the company has been quite public about its approach. CTO Jonathan Murray is a regular speaker at industry events and recently gave a keynote at the Platform Conference. In it he explained the thinking and the process behind what they are building – a platform for the entire future of the company.

While the technical details of what Murray covered are interesting and important for practitioners, the key message for business leaders is the approach whereby WMG delivers an IT shop that is likened to a factory. Since its genesis typified by white-coated technicians massaging fragile machines, IT has enjoyed the perception that it is an arcane trade – part magic and part artisan. One only needs to immerse oneself in social media to understand just how seriously practitioners can obsess over minutiae. And yet what IT should really be doing is delivering tools to its stakeholders.

This is the ethos that Murray espoused in his recent blog post in which he detailed his vision of the “Composable Enterprise” as he wrote in the post:

Our cur­rent IT ser­vices were built to serve a sta­tic – and often func­tion­ally silo’d – oper­at­ing model. IT needs to become much more dynam­i­cally adapt­able to keep pace with the speed of busi­ness today… A new Com­po­nent Archi­tec­ture Model approach to IT infra­struc­ture, appli­ca­tions and ser­vices will be required to ensure that IT can deliver what the busi­ness needs. The time between iden­ti­fy­ing a busi­ness need and deliv­er­ing the required IT solu­tion needs to becomes hours and days rather than months and years.

This might seem like the stuff of fairytales but in fact the technology exists today to make it real – Open Source, cloud computing and the move to automation makes it all possible. The one stumbling block however is organizational culture and willingness to embrace change, remove the shackles of legacy approaches and adapt an iterative approach. It’s not easy, but it’s inherently possible. Take half an hour from your day and watch Murray’s keynote. See just how many of your preconceived ideas about how change is impossible in your organization get negated.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. Read more about Ben here.

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